Saving Grace

J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Childhood of Jesus’

Like J. M. Coetzee’s richly symbolic early novels “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Life and Times of Michael K,” his starkly narrated new novel plunges us at once into a mysterious and dreamlike terrain. But where those books evoke Coetzee’s native South Africa and the madness of apartheid, immersing the reader in situations of nearly unbearable intensity, “The Childhood of Jesus” is set in a possibly posthumous limbo in which a haze of forgetfulness has enervated most of the characters, as in a paralyzing smog. We arrive by boat in a city called Novilla, in an unnamed but possibly southern European country, in the company of a man named Simón, who has taken under his protection a child named David — “Not my grandson, not my son, but I am responsible for him.” It would appear that the travelers are refugees: they have come from a “camp,” a place called Belstar, where they were given Spanish lessons and two passbooks. The child has been separated from his parents. Simón seems to have no family at all. Having, like all his fellow travelers, been shorn of his memory on the voyage to Novilla, Simón arrives in unknown territory and must establish himself; he must find shelter and he must find work to support himself and the boy. If Simón has had a profession or a trade in his former life, he can’t recall it; he is grateful to find work as a stevedore, for which he is barely qualified. It will be Simón’s obsession to locate David’s mother, whose name he doesn’t know and of whom he knows nothing, not even whether she has arrived in this strange, nameless country.

In time we learn that Simón and David are arbitrary names; no one in this place knows his or her birth name; even ages and birth dates have been distributed randomly: “The names we use are the names we were given, . . . but we might just as well have been given numbers. Numbers, names — they are equally arbitrary, equally random, equally unimportant.”

It’s an unusual dystopian fiction in which a protagonist is so passive in his acceptance of his fate, but Simón exhibits virtually no curiosity about such decisions or who the anonymous authorities that administer them might be. Just possibly, the enigmatically titled “Childhood of Jesus” isn’t a dystopian fiction at all.

Spanish is the official language of the new country, and no others are spoken or taught. As Simón tries to explain to David, who has begun to take refuge in jabbering to himself using private, nonsensical words: “Everyone comes to this country as a stranger. . . . We came from various places and various pasts, seeking a new life. But now we are all in the same boat together. So we have to get along with each other. One of the ways in which we get along is by speaking the same language. That is the rule. It is a good rule, and we should obey it. . . . If you refuse, if you go on being rude about Spanish and insist on speaking your own language, then you are going to find yourself living in a private world.”

The conflict between the private world of individual, childish fantasy (suggested by a copy of “Don Quixote” to which David clings) and the larger, public, impersonal world that demands conformity of all citizens would seem to be a predominant theme of “The Childhood of Jesus.”

Here is not the chill, mounting terror of Orwell’s “1984,” nor even the somnolent haze of Huxley’s “Brave New World,” but rather a quasi-socialist state in which conformity, mediocrity and anonymity are both the norm and the highest values. There appear to be no threats of punishment — the very term “police” is used only once, as a warning when David refuses to attend school like other children; no police officers ever appear. The indistinctly dreamlike, minimally described atmosphere suggests a Kafkaesque cityscape or a near-barren Beckett stage. (The penultimate chapter of Coetzee’s 2003 novel “Elizabeth Costello” is an “appropriation” of several fabled prose pieces of Kafka. Coetzee wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Samuel Beckett and has clearly been influenced by him.)

An invisible but benign bureaucracy oversees individual lives at a considerable distance. Most citizens are grateful for their sustenance and for accommodations in uniform housing blocks; some watch football matches, others attend night-school classes in the hope of self-­improvement. All appear content to live lives somewhere below the level of what Henry David Thoreau called quiet desperation. Boredom? Sexual yearning? Suffering, dying, death? Why be concerned? As one citizen typically remarks, “If he died he will go on to the next life.”

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Credit
Ben Wiseman

Simón has difficulty adjusting. He has lost his memory yet retains a discomforting “memory of having a memory.” Though he tries to conform to the ­worker-ant society, he feels alienated from the very atmosphere of Novilla — a generalized “benevolence,” “a cloud of good will.” Nothing seems urgent here, nothing is privatized. All is generic, universal, impersonal.

In uniformly plain, flat, unadorned prose, in which nothing so luxurious as a metaphor emerges, or a striking employment of syntax, or a word of more than a few syllables, Coetzee never suggests any sort of nationalism or religious tradition — there are no churches, synagogues or mosques in this exhausted country. It would appear to be a wholly secular state, a non-nation, with a predominantly socialist agenda, lacking history. All its citizens are amnesiacs. Love, desire, even intense friendship are virtually unknown. When Simón complains that good will, a “universal balm for our ills,” is no substitute for “plain old physical contact,” he’s met with a bemused rejoinder: “If by sleeping with someone you mean sex — quite strange too. A strange thing to be preoccupied with.”

Surrounded by benevolent zombies, Simón plaintively demands, “Have you ever asked yourself whether the price we pay for this new life, the price of forgetting, may not be too high?” He is the only person to rage against the loss of a fuller humanity: “When we have annihilated our hunger, you say, we will have proved we can adapt, and we can be happy for ever after. But I don’t want to starve the dog of hunger. I want to feed it!” Literally, Simón wants to eat meat — “Beefsteak with mashed potatoes and gravy. . . . Beefsteak dripping with meat juices.” He is deeply unhappy that the diet in Novilla is mostly crackers, bread and a tepid sort of bean paste; there is almost no variety in this community, and absolutely no irony: “It is so bloodless. Everyone I meet is so decent, so kindly, so well intentioned. No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. . . . How can that be, humanly speaking? Are you lying, even to yourselves?”

As a committed vegetarian, Coetzee has written passionately and scathingly of the custom of eating meat. In the mock-autobiographical/confessional “Elizabeth Costello,” he has suggested that the Holocaust of 20th-century Europe is not essentially different from the holocaust of daily animal slaughter and that meat-eaters are not to be distinguished from the Nazis who made soap of human beings and fashioned lampshades from their skin. (Delivered as a “fable-lecture” at Princeton University in the 1997-98 Tanner Lecture series, this excerpt from Coetzee’s work-in-progress created a ripple of unease and indignation among the mostly meat-eating academic audience. If it was Coetzee’s intention to unsettle them, he succeeded brilliantly. At the official dinner that followed, no meat was served to any guest.) Yet in this scene, as in others in “The Childhood of Jesus,” the reader is inclined to assume that Simón is speaking for the author, in a rare and welcome display of feeling in a novel so generally muted in emotion.

Perhaps, however, the issue of Simón’s unhappiness is essentially a philosophical one: it’s not sex or love per se, but the very phenomenon of passion that needs to be examined, as in this rather prissy lecture put to Simón by the “gaunt” woman with whom he has been having a perfunctory affair:

“In the old way of thinking, no matter how much you may have, there is always something missing. The name you choose to give this something-more that is missing is passion. . . . This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of. . . . Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion.”

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This is the vocabulary of Buddhist and Hindu epistemology: the world of transient attachments and desires is an illusion, and to free oneself from such is to free oneself from illusion. Yet to attain this enlightenment is, in a sense, to renounce what is fully human; it is a kind of death. Like an obtuse naïf, Simón is frequently rebuked. “This isn’t a possible world,” he is told, “it is the only world.”

Starved for “feminine beauty” as well as for beefsteak, Simón tries to register with a service called Salón Confort, where he will have sessions with sex workers. When his application is ignored, it is tactlessly suggested that he “withdraw from sex. You are old enough to do so.” In this, Simón is clearly akin to the emotionally starved “professor of communications” in one of Coetzee’s best-known novels, “Disgrace,” whose rejection by an escort-for-hire whom he has been seeing routinely for years precipitates the disaster — the “disgrace” — of his life.

One day, abruptly, in a display of irrationality that seems out of character, Simón decides that a woman he has seen playing tennis, a complete stranger, is David’s mother — “I recognized her as soon as I set eyes on her.” The woman, Inés, is a “blank slate, a virgin slate,” upon which Simón can project his private, highly idiosyncratic meaning. Unless “The Childhood of Jesus” is a fable of the absurd and not a realistic novel, it’s difficult to see how or why Simón would act so brashly. He duly arranges for the “stolid, humorless” Inés to live with David in the flat he and the boy have occupied, supported by Simón. In this way, an impromptu family is created, ex nihilo.

Photo

Credit
Ben Wiseman

The reader might wonder at this point: If David is, in some sense, the child Jesus, is the stolid Inés meant to suggest, or in some way to be, the biblical Virgin Mary? In which case, is Simón an avatar of the biblical Joseph? Given the solemnity of this far-fetched development, it’s also possible that Coetzee is gently parodying messianic delusions among people who have nothing else to sustain them.

The remainder of “The Childhood of Jesus” is taken up with the protracted struggle of David’s pseudo-parents over the boy, not unlike the struggle of ordinary parents with “difficult” children. Inés infantilizes David as “the light of my life” and wants to keep him with her at home, while Simón wants to send him to school. Both are adamantly certain that David is “exceptional.”

Not a very convincing child, David would seem to be a symbol in the author’s imagination of “childness” in the Romantic, Wordsworthian sense — that is, the child as close to God, “trailing clouds of glory.” Consequently, the reader has difficulty forming a coherent picture of him. At times David seems emotionally disturbed, possibly autistic or mildly schizophrenic; he has no friends at school and his teacher finds him essentially unteachable, since he is a disruptive presence in the classroom. Yet his immature behavior might be a consequence of adult overindulgence. He is unusually bright at times, then again obstinate, exasperating.

If David is indeed meant to be the child Jesus, Coetzee has not fashioned an appropriate early life for him, for David’s concerns are exclusively for himself and not for others; indeed, David seems to have no sense of the existence of others, stubbornly convinced that whatever he thinks is true. (Told that things must have value before they can be placed in a museum, David replies, “What is value?” His argument is, in a sense, irrefutable: “I prize it. It’s my museum, not yours.”)

Soon, the child begins to make grandiloquent pronouncements: “I haven’t got a mother and I haven’t got a father. I just am.” “Yo soy la verdad. ‘I am the truth.’ ” A child psychologist determines that the boy is maladjusted: “The real . . . is what David misses in his life. This experience of lacking the real includes the experience of lacking real parents. David has no anchor in his life.” Yet no one in Novilla has any anchor in life, since no one has any memory of a life before Novilla. In fact, Novilla seems scarcely to exist, a sketchily imagined, fictitious place that might well be a bare, Beckett stage on which actors are reading scripts they don’t fully understand, at the bequest of a director who remains elusive and seems to have relinquished the very responsibility of direction. In this existential stalemate, even Simón is reduced to a primitive cri de coeur: “The life I have is not enough for me. I wish someone, some savior, would descend from the skies.”

“The Childhood of Jesus” is clearly an allegory — some might say, echoing Melville, “a hideous and intolerable allegory” — but it isn’t an allegory with the transparency of Plato’s allegory of the cave, Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” or Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” Nor is it an allegory of the emotional, psychological and visceral density of “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Life and Times of Michael K,” which, along with “Disgrace,” set in a recognizably real post-apartheid South Africa, constitute Coetzee’s major works of fiction. With few clues, the reader is left to wonder: Is Novilla a socialist utopia or rather a parody of a socialist utopia? Does it represent the realization of Buddhist asceticism, the triumph of spiritual detachment over sensual appetite? Or, given the title, is this the Christian renunciation of the flesh? Are the inhabitants of Novilla political refugees? Are they even alive, and not lost, wandering souls? Is this a Bardo state, following death, as imagined in “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”? But why have they lost their memories? (In mimicry of José Saramago’s allegorical novel “Blindness,” which dramatizes the effects of an epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city?)

For a while I speculated that “The Childhood of Jesus” might be a novel of ideas in which the stillness of the Buddhist vision of enlightenment and the striving of Christian salvation are contrasted: the one essentially cyclical, the other “progressive”; the goal of one the annihilation of the individual personality in a sort of universal void, and the goal of the other the “salvation” of a distinctly individual personality and its guarantee of everlasting life and reunion with loved ones in heaven. More plausibly, it seemed likely that “The Childhood of Jesus” is a Kafka-inspired parable of the quest for meaning itself: for reasons to endure when (secular) life lacks passion and purpose. Only an arbitrary mission — searching for the mother of an orphaned child, believing in a savior who descends from the sky — can give focus to a life otherwise undefined and random.

It’s a bleak and intransigent vision, reminiscent of the painful ending of “Disgrace,” for here the possibility of a “new life” in another city seems just another delusion, however idealistic and quixotic. And what is the role of “Don Quixote” in the novel? For this isn’t the “Don Quixote” of Cervantes but, in a perplexing Borgesian twist, the author is “a man named Benengeli” who wears “a long robe and has a turban on his head.” Perhaps, one day, Elizabeth Costello will enlighten us.

THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS

By J. M. Coetzee

277 pp. Viking. $26.95.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of the forthcoming collection “Evil Eye.”

A version of this review appears in print on September 1, 2013, on Page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Saving Grace. Today's Paper|Subscribe